- What is an Entrepreneurial Personality?
- Key Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
- How to Develop Entrepreneurial Traits
- Examples of Successful Entrepreneurs
- Conclusion and Next Steps
Q: What traits are essential for entrepreneurial success?
A. Key traits for entrepreneurial success include curiosity, willingness to experiment, adaptability, decisiveness, resilience, creativity, and self-awareness.
If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) for psychological self-assessments, you’re also probably familiar with the 16 personality types subsumed into four categories—analysts, diplomats, sentinels, and explorers.
Somewhere in the explorers’ category, you’d find the entrepreneur personality type, described as “smart, energetic and very perspective people, who truly enjoy living on the edge.”
The MBTI theory suggests that those who fall into the entrepreneurial personality type are Extraverted, Observant, Thinking, and Prospecting (ESTP).
Maybe you agree with everything so far.
Maybe you are now thinking, “I’m an entrepreneur, but I’m not an extrovert and don’t enjoy living life on the edge!”
Or you are leaning farther towards the edge: “Aw, shucks, I don’t have some of these entrepreneurial personality traits; I’d never achieve entrepreneurial success.”
Whatever your perception of these entrepreneurial personality traits, you are on the right track. The important thing is that you have a view of them.
The MBTI ESTP personality type serves as pointers and indicators for individuals embarking on a journey to entrepreneurial success to conduct a self-assessment.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, self-assessment helps you identify what or where you need to improve to embody successful entrepreneur characteristics.
Think it’s too late to start cultivating these traits?
It might surprise you to know that as successful as he is as an entrepreneur, Elon Musk was not always the seemingly outgoing person he is today. But more on that later.
The thing to know is that to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to inculcate the ESTP elements and be willing to put yourself out there. That’s how you empower yourself with the confidence, adaptability, and intuition you need to break into markets and assert dominance.
In this piece, we’ll discuss the key traits of an entrepreneur, how to develop those traits, and examples of successful entrepreneurs with those traits.
But first, let’s dissect entrepreneurial personality traits a bit more.
What Is an Entrepreneurial Personality?
An entrepreneurial personality includes the traits and characteristics commonly found in successful entrepreneurs, such as curiosity, adaptability, and resilience.
It is a personality type that has four primary traits, including extroversion, observance (also called sensing), thinking, and perceiving (also called prospecting), according to MBTI.
Individuals with entrepreneurial personalities don’t shy away from competition. When they identify what they are good at, they go all in regardless of the challenges piled on their path.
They are dynamic, persuasive, incisive, creative, and resourceful goal-oriented go-getters, which earns them various nicknames across texts, such as energetic promoter, supreme realist, and energetic problem solver.
It’s easy to see how these perceptions fit when you consider the four ESTP preferences:
- Extroversion: Entrepreneurs tend to draw their energy and validation from the outer self rather than the inner self. By putting themselves out there, they find opportunities that they turn into businesses.
- Sensing or observance: Entrepreneurs can look at and analyze things around them to extract nuances and subtleties in facts and real-life experiences, enabling them to understand problems and quickly provide practical solutions.
- Thinking: Entrepreneurs are decision-makers who love getting straight to the point. Will this work or not? How do we address this to get the desired results? For the entrepreneur, there is no need to waste time on unnecessary discussions that don’t improve decision-making. They are always ideating the way forward.
- Perceiving or prospecting: As already mentioned, entrepreneurs are always thinking of the way forward. This means they see their environment as a fertile ground of endless opportunities.
These trait preferences are important for achieving business success, as they put proactive entrepreneurs one step ahead in any situation.
As they continuously prospect and think of new ways of doing things, they also observe their relevant markets, target consumers, and build networks with relevant individuals and organizations to advance their ideas, thus boosting their success rates.
Common Myths about Entrepreneurial Personalities
Some of the common myths and misconceptions about entrepreneurial personalities include:
- Having ESTP personalities means you are ripe to be a successful entrepreneur: Well, we will keep things simple and tell you right away that it doesn’t. The “born to rule” concept doesn’t apply here. Having these personalities is only one part of the journey; you must make conscious efforts as a business owner to battle bottlenecks, develop your skills, and learn how to succeed.
In fact, one of the things that make great entrepreneurs is the ability to accept failure as many times as it happens and keep moving.
- Entrepreneurs are always confident: While it is true that most entrepreneurs are outgoing, that doesn’t automatically equate to evergreen confidence. There’ll be moments of self-doubt along the way. Sometimes, you might find yourself deep in the self-deprecating zone, but you must remember your goals and shake things off.
- Entrepreneurs take extreme risks: You are probably one of those who, at the beginning of this article, thought, “Nah, I don’t like living life on the edge.” As much as entrepreneurs are known for risk-taking, there are some degrees of circumspection that come with those risks. By observing, thinking, and prospecting, successful entrepreneurs can identify risks worth taking and give them a shot.
There are a bunch of other myths out there, but these pretty much paint the full picture of where those misconceptions are rooted.
Key Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
Recall that the four ESTP preferences and traits are rooted in the “explorer personality” category. The ESTP preferences and traits further form the foundation for several entrepreneur traits that are associated with entrepreneurial success.
Let’s look at them.
Creativity
Since creativity is commonly associated with being artistic, it might seem odd to list it among the business personality traits of successful entrepreneurs.
If you think so, you are likely looking at it wrong.
Entrepreneurial creativity is the bedrock of innovation.
Creativity is what drives an entrepreneur to see into the future and develop new ideas and practical solutions to problems before they are needed, enabling the entrepreneur to create new value and keep things going for their customers, according to Entrepreneur.
Curiosity
Think childlike curiosity: the natural desire and willingness to explore, discover, learn, and figure out how things work.
Curiosity is a successful entrepreneur characteristic that drives and pushes entrepreneurs to seek new opportunities, understand them, and create businesses out of them.
Like a child and the objects around it, the entrepreneur is filled with a burning desire to know more about every relevant aspect of their target market.
Willingness to Experiment
Recall that one of the things that make a great entrepreneur is the ability to embrace failure.
This entrepreneurial mindset comes attached with the willingness to experiment.
Yes, the chances of success might seem slim. But since what’s on the table has been validated as a viable business idea, an entrepreneur would gamble on those slim chances and work towards having more favorable outcomes.
In Teaching Entrepreneurship, a blog series hosted by Forbes some years back, experimentation was identified as a core part of entrepreneurship.
Essentially, entrepreneurship is “about experimenting—trying something, seeing what the results are, learning from the results, and then trying it again.”
Talking about Amazon’s approach to experimentation and failure, Jeff Bezos wrote:
“I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
Put simply, experimentation will take you a long way as an entrepreneur.
Adaptability
Most entrepreneurs take risks not necessarily because they love taking risks but because they have acknowledged that there will always be challenges in their line of business and are willing to refine their strategies to face them.
Adaptability is one of the key traits of an entrepreneur that would push you through those challenges.
Adaptability is a marriage between flexibility and agility, birthing a drive that empowers entrepreneurs to deal with changing market conditions and business challenges as they come.
That’s why, although the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Chamber of Commerce report that 18% of small businesses fail in the first, 50% by the fifth year, and 65% by the tenth year, there are still businesses that face all the challenges faced by the others and continue through generations.
Decisiveness
Decisiveness is another key characteristic of entrepreneurs. This entrepreneur personality trait sets them on the path of quick decision-making after considering the facts of a situation.
It helps entrepreneurs identify business opportunities and make timely and effective business decisions to tap into and fully maximize them when others are still contemplating whether to or not.
This entrepreneur personality trait shares a thin border with impulsiveness, which has been widely recognized as one of the most common entrepreneur weaknesses.
Resilience
If there’s another thing to take from the Jeff Bezos quote posted earlier, it is resilience. Considering Amazon’s history and the number of products worked on, one could safely conclude that Amazon excels at failure.
From the early days to today, Amazon’s story has been rife with challenges and failures.
Even from the onset, Amazon warned investors that there was a 70% chance of Amazon failing or going bankrupt. Still, Jeff’s resilience keeps things going from success to success.
Resilience in the face of market challenges is one of the key entrepreneurial personality traits that keep entrepreneurs—both in small- and large-scale enterprises—from slipping into absolute defeat or burnout.
Self-Awareness
Although most entrepreneurs pursue business ideas head-on, there is a degree of circumspection stemmed in self-awareness that informs most entrepreneurs of their strengths and capabilities.
Having this entrepreneurial personality will inform you of the risks that are worth taking and those you should forgo.
Take a leaf from a largely successful serial entrepreneur like Gary Vaynerchuk, who Entrepreneur quoted as once saying, “I suck at 99 percent of stuff, but I go all out on that 1 percent I’m good at.”
How to Develop Entrepreneurial Traits
At the beginning of this piece, we implied that there’s no need to exclude yourself from the entrepreneurs’ league simply because you lack the MBTI entrepreneur personality traits or preferences.
Why should you when you can develop them over time and continue with unwavering steps to entrepreneurial success?
Below are some pointers to help you with developing entrepreneurial traits.
Self-Reflection
Recall that MBTI personalities are benchmarks for self-assessment. Essentially, to develop the traits of an entrepreneur that would put you on the path to success, you must embrace self-reflection.
You can identify and weigh your strengths and weaknesses by answering the following questions:
- What are you good at?
- What about you will make you a good entrepreneur?
- Are there key characteristics you don’t have? How do you improve on them?
- Do you need professional mentorship to develop or improve some of these successful entrepreneur characteristics?
- What are the lessons to draw from your previous solo business attempts or partnerships?
Questions, questions, and more questions.
The goal is to find your strengths and areas for improvement.
Although the typical entrepreneur levitates towards the outer self and world, there are many reasons to be self-aware and embrace self-reflection as a resting point to revive oneself, gain strength, and continue your entrepreneurial journey.
Continuous Learning
Regardless of your field and resources, learning is a continuous process for all entrepreneurs. It’s not only about probing scenarios and situations to find new business ideas and opportunities; it’s also about finding new ways to improve your skills, personality, and other elements of personal development.
Learn to communicate effectively. Learn to be organized, resilient, self-aware, decisive, and strategic.
The number of entrepreneurial resources you’ll find on self-development would surprise you. This indicates that, like you, many entrepreneurs never stopped improving their personalities.
As you learn these traits within the contexts of your industry, you also get to know why the successful entrepreneurs in your industry are who they are today and how you can improve to measure up to or even beat their standards.
Networking
It takes effort, patience, and time to build and maintain networks. However, once you have a strong network, you have access to mentors, advisors, investors, other entrepreneurs, employees, and even customers who can provide valuable advice and support to help you grow your business, according to a Forbes contribution.
Networking with other entrepreneurs and industry professionals is, in a sense, part of the continuous learning process.
Besides keeping you up to date with industry trends, networking brings you closer to successful entrepreneurs and professionals.
This closeness makes it more convenient for you to learn through observation and interaction. You could extract valuable lessons on how to learn and develop key entrepreneur traits that facilitate entrepreneurial success.
Practical Exercises
Engage in activities and events that help you build character and develop the traits of an entrepreneur.
The following are good examples:
Examples of Successful Entrepreneurs
We’ve made references to the business personality traits of entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Elon Musk, which have made them the entrepreneurial success that they are today.
Let’s take a deeper look into the entrepreneur personality of Elon Musk and other successful entrepreneurs such as Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson.
Elon Musk
One could say that Elon Musk was born an entrepreneur. At the age of 10, he became aware of his passion for coding and dove into it, self-learning and practicing along the way.
By the time he was 12, he had developed a video game called “Blastar,” which he sold for $500 in 1984, according to Yahoo Finance.
In his early 20s, Musk co-founded Zip2, a software company for creating city guides, which he sold in 1999 for $307 million and $34 million worth of stock options.
He used the money from the payout to create X.com (not to be confused with Twitter), a fintech company that later merged with a money transfer company called Confinity to create PayPal.
With the money from the PayPal buyout— upwards of $175 million—he allocated $100 million to developing SpaceX, $70 million to Tesla, and $10 million to SolarCity. At the time he was developing all these businesses concurrently, he had to borrow money for rent, according to him.
Today, Tesla is worth about $792 billion, SpaceX $200 billion, and SolarCity $3.5 billion.
Elon Musk is now also at the helm of other multibillion-dollar firms, including Boring Co., X, and Neuralink.
From his entrepreneurial endeavors, we can extract some key traits of an entrepreneur, including:
- Willingness to explore and experiment: Musk apparently has no problem dabbling in any venture he thinks is viable.
- Resilience and adaptability: Despite being ousted from PayPal and facing serious hurdles when acquiring Twitter, he still made the best of both situations.
- Decisiveness and risk-taking: Although it meant draining his wealth, he recognized solid business opportunities in Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity, and went all out to put his money in them while having to borrow for rent. It’s also noteworthy that he left his Ph.D program after two days, to develop his first company, Zip2, with his brother, with only $15,000.
Oprah Winfrey
For most people, the name “Oprah Winfrey” immediately brings The Oprah Winfrey Show to mind. That’s understandable, as it is what brought her global fame and 46 Emmy Awards.
It will interest you to know that Winfrey’s entrepreneurial venture didn’t start nor stop at The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Before the show, her brilliance and drive for success had taken her through various hosting jobs from when she was 18, finally leading her to start her own production company, Harpo, Inc., at 32 years old.
Harpo is the driving force behind the following:
- O, The Oprah Magazine
- Harpo Radio
- Harpo Studios, which later gave room to the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN)
Winfrey also had her hands in other mission-based projects and businesses that aligned with her interests and values, including:
- Oprah.com, a website Oprah uses to promote the things she loves, such as healthy eating and reading.
- Weight Watchers (WW International), a company that focuses on supporting sustainable weight loss
- True Food Kitchen, a restaurant chain focused on making healthy eating more available and accessible.
- Maven Clinic, an online platform focusing on fertility, pregnancy, and parenting.
- Oatley, a Swedish oat milk company
She also has a real estate venture, Oprah Winfrey Homes, in her portfolio.
There are various entrepreneurial mindsets to pick from Winfrey, but the two key traits to take home are self-awareness and resilience.
In her own words:
“I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.”
As a media mogul, she’s been at the center of various scandals that would ordinarily break many, but she’s still going strong. She also has the self-awareness to navigate her industries of interest with caution and invest her money where it matters.
Richard Branson
Richard Branson fits the profile of entrepreneurs who like living life on the edge but within and outside business environments.
Besides being well-known as the wealthy and flamboyant British entrepreneur behind Virgin Group, which controls over 400 companies today, he holds records in hot-air ballooning and powerboat racing.
His entrepreneurial ventures span various fields, including wireless communications, radio stations, hotels, space tourism, hotels, record labels, radio stations, health clubs, finance, renewable energy, car racing, and megastores.
There are far too many of them to keep up with.
Richard Branson hopped into the entrepreneurial world at 16, starting with a magazine called “Student.” Within the first year, he sold over $7,000 in advertising.
When the magazine started losing money, he jumped ship and started the Virgin Mail Order Records in 1970. From there, he moved on to launch the first British discount record store, followed by the Virgin Record.
He journeyed from venture to venture until he became the majority funder of British Atlantic Airways in 1984, which he renamed Virgin Atlantic. Starting with just a single aircraft, the airline quickly grew to become a global name despite stiff competition and challenges from established competitors.
From there, there was no stopping Richard Branson.
By the 1990s, the Virgin group had become one of the largest privately held businesses in the UK, diving into and boosting commerce across various industries.
Really, there are far too many aspects of Richard Branson to keep up with, but at every corner you can see decisiveness, resilience, creativity, adaptability, curiosity, and experimentation written in bold!
Wrapping Up: Entrepreneur Personality
There is an apparent relationship between entrepreneur personality and business success. And it’s comforting to know that those personalities are something you can work on and develop to boost your chances of entrepreneurial success.
Take some time for self-reflection, review all the entrepreneurial personality traits listed in this article, and identify areas for improvement.
Network with like-minded individuals, including entrepreneurs, industry professionals, mentors, and even your clients, to find new ways to improve your business and yourself.
Remember, development is a continuous process. Therefore, you must never stop learning. Practical exercises like brainstorming, experimentation, and setting learning goals can substantially improve your entrepreneurial traits.
Further Reading:
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
- Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works
If it seems impossible, remember that some of the most successful entrepreneurs didn’t have it easy, but they excelled anyway. Draw some lessons on entrepreneur personalities from their stories.
Of course, business doesn’t just fall into your lap because of your entrepreneurial mindset. You must put in considerable effort and leverage business growth tools, such as Alliance Virtual Offices’ virtual office and live receptionist services, to expedite entrepreneurial success.
Contact us today to learn more about Alliance Virtual Offices’ services and how they can help you establish credible and professional business presence instantly across multiple locations, across the globe.
